A Peach Of A Problem

In less than a month, there are going to be elections down in Georgia that are going to be right close. So, right on cue, there's confusion about who is legally registered to vote, and there is a Republican Secretary of State talking darkly about "voter fraud" in relation to a project designed to get more people to the polls, many of whom are African American, and many of whom are likely not to vote for the Secretary of State's party. There is a lawsuit filed against him by the organization. He has dropped subpoenas on the organization. The whole system has become a mess. Stop me if you've seen this movie before.

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At issue is something called the New Georgia Project, an aggressive voter-registration program targeting minorities, young people, and other groups heretofore marginalized by the election process. Along with other, smaller groups, the NGP had registered nearly 120,000 new voters when, a little over a month ago, Republican Secretary of State Brian Kemp hit the group with a subpoena, charging that "significant illegal activity" had been involved in the registration effort. In a development that will come as no surprise to anyone who used to work for ACORN, the NGP is being harassed for doing what it is required to do by law.

Abrams is quick to point out, however, that her group is required by law to turn in every application they collect, even if it contains errors. "If the form says Mickey Mouse registered in Anaheim, California, we have to turn that form in," Abrams said in an interview with Newsweek last week. That's why she's calling the investigation a witch hunt. "There was no way to win. And that's what this really resembles," Abrams said. "We were being told if you follow the law, you were wrong. And if you didn't follow the law, you're wrong."

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And, in a development that will come as no surprise to anyone who has followed how this scam has worked in other states, Kemp's gumshoes have revealed a nickel's worth of problems for every $1000 worth of bluster. Perhaps the definition of "significant" is different down there.

At the the State Elections Board meeting, Kemp's office stated that there were 25 forms that are not valid and another 26 that are suspect. Kemp's chief investigator, Chris Harvey, acknowledged that the New Georgia Project has been helpful in identifying the problematic forms. "Essentially, there could be 51 out of 85,000 forms that were turned in by law that could be invalid. That's the story," Abrams said. "Our reaction has been fairly aggressive because to suggest as he did in that letter that we were engaged in something that was nefarious was not only wrong on its face, it had the very real effect of trying to stymie registration through our organization."

And it's not like the Georgia Republicans were brimming with good faith to begin with. Take Fran Millar, a Republican state legislator from Dunwoody. Fran was quite agitated about all the black people who take advantage of early voting.

Now we are to have Sunday voting at South DeKalb Mall just prior to the election. Per Jim Galloway of the AJC, this location is dominated by African American shoppers and it is near several large African American mega churches such as New Birth Missionary Baptist. Galloway also points out the Democratic Party thinks this is a wonderful idea - what a surprise. I'm sure Michelle Nunn and Jason Carter are delighted with this blatantly partisan move in DeKalb. Is it possible church buses will be used to transport people directly to the mall since the poll will open when the mall opens? If this happens, so much for the accepted principle of separation of church and state.

This wish for "educated voters", of course, comes from a guy belonging to a state party that gifted the national legislature with brainiacs like Paul Broun and Phil Gingrey. Meanwhile, Kemp himself got in trouble by pretty much giving the game away.

In closing, I just wanted to tell you, real quick, after we get through this runoff, you know the Democrats are working hard, and all these stories about them, you know, registering all these minority voters that are out there and others that are sitting on the sidelines, if they can do that, they can win these elections in November."

Now, Kemp wasn't directly calling for these efforts to be suppressed, but his comments indicated that, as the official tasked with protecting the integrity of Georgia's elections, he is overly concerned with which voters out there might most inconvenience his party. He does, in fact, work for "all these minority voters," too. This is not a helpful thing, and it throws a most unflattering light on the subpoenas that emanated from Kemp's office.

The lawsuit comes in direct response to the handling of voter registration applications by the state and Fulton, DeKalb, Chatham, Muscogee and Clayton as they were submitted by the New Georgia Project, a Democratic-backed group under investigation by Kemp over accusations of voter registration fraud. More than 50,000 of the paper forms submitted by the group seem to be lost in the state's voting system, Lawyers' Committee attorney Julie Houk said. They neither appear on voter rolls nor do they show up on lists of "pending" voters who have been asked to provide more information to verify who they are.

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I grew up in Massachusetts, and I know ballot monkey mischief when I see it. Kemp did himself no favors by refusing to meet with the Lawyers' Committee prior to the committee's filing the lawsuit. But, once it was filed, Kemp assumed the Outraged Innocent posture favored by public officials who find their integrity under attack.

It was much the same story from Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp who was in Savannah Thursday afternoon. Kemp told News 3 "We never got the forms at the Secretary of State's office.They were all given to the county offices and the counties have worked through the applications so there is no missing 40,000 applications. They've all been processed. Many of those were duplicates. Others were not complete therefore they are not going to be in the system," Kemp said.

The county officials say the forms were sent to Kemp, who says his office never got them, and around and around we go. This is the way the new Jim Crow works -- subtly, through bureaucratic shenanigans rather than tobacco-dripping scorn, and it is deeply embedded at this point in conservative -- and, therefore, Republican -- politics, and it has been ever since "all these minority voters" got together and helped elect the black guy twice. On Tuesday, Kris Kobach, the Kansas Secretary of State, and the father and chief advocate of the restrictions that make up the new Jim Crow, dropped by the Heritage Foundation to defend his work.

"Voter fraud exists and it's everywhere," Kobach told The Daily Signal in an interview after the event, which also featured Colorado Secretary of State Scott Gessler and Catherine Engelbrecht, president of True the Vote. Kobach added: The best way to stop voter fraud is to stop it at the front end rather than hope you can detect it at the back end and prosecute it. You have to put these systems in place so only legitimate U.S. citizens are on the voter rolls, and also to ensure when a person shows up to vote he is who he says he is...Kobach, who is running for re-election, says the 2011 Kansas law blocked the registrations of a dozen or so non-residents.He calls the notion that voter ID laws target minority groups an "outrageous argument."

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If there's any ray of light to this whole fiasco, it's that the threadbare schemes promoted by the likes of Kobach, and True The Vote -- which is not a voter-suppression organization despite the fact that everything it does has the happy accident of making it harder for some people to vote -- are finally generating significant pushback from people who now decline to ignore what's in plain view around them. A GAO report made public this month demonstrated that these laws did precisely what they were intended to do -- namely, suppress the votes of people who the framers of the laws would prefer not to vote. The courts are wising up, too -- from the Nine Wise Souls down in Washington to the district judges around the country. The press is becoming more skeptical. Hell, Kris Kobach might even lose his campaign for re-election, as Kansas seems poised to bum-rush out of office the conservative fantasts who've wrecked that state in so many different ways.

Since his Kansas restrictions took effect last year, fully 16 percent of people seeking to register for the first time - currently more than 22,000 people - have had their applications delayed because they have not produced proof of citizenship, according to Mr. Kobach's office. His Democratic challenger, Jean Schodorf, called this a modern poll tax and a national disgrace. "Are you proud of the Kansas we have today," she said at the candidates' forum, "or like most of us are you embarrassed?"

And then there's Judge Richard Posner, the conservative jurist who wrote the 2007 decision in Crawford v. Marion County Election Board. upholding an Indiana voter-ID law, a case that is widely reckoned to have opened the floodgates for the laws presently mottling elections around the country. While Posner insists that he is not recanting his decision in that case, he has admitted he was wrong, and he has grown ferocious in his opposition to the kind of laws that Crawford made possible. This past week, in his dissenting opinion in a case involving the Wisconsin voter-ID law, Posner took a flamethrower to the shabby legal rationale that cloaks what amounts to an organized campaign of ratfking in office.

-"Some of the 'evidence' of voter-impersonation fraud is downright goofy, if not paranoid, such as the nonexistent buses that according to the 'True the Vote' movement transport foreigners and reservation Indians to polling places."

-"As there is no evidence that voter-impersonation fraud is a problem, how can the fact that a legislature says it's a problem turn it into one? If the Wisconsin legislature says witches are a problem, shall Wisconsin courts be permitted to conduct witch trials?"

-"There is no evidence that Wisconsin's voter rolls are inflated - as were Indiana's - and there is compelling evidence that voter-impersonation fraud is essentially nonexistent in Wisconsin."

-"The panel opinion states that requiring a photo ID might at least prevent persons who 'are too young or are not citizens' from voting. Not so. State-issued IDs are available to noncitizens ... - all that's required is proof of 'legal presence in the United States[.]'

-"This implies that the net effect of such requirements is to impede voting by people easily discouraged from voting, most of whom probably lean Democratic."

-"The panel opinion does not discuss the cost of obtaining a photo ID. It assumes the cost is negligible. That's an easy assumption for federal judges to make, since we are given photo IDs by court security free of charge. And we have upper-middle-class salaries. Not everyone is so fortunate."

-"There is only one motivation for imposing burdens on voting that are ostensibly designed to discourage voter-impersonation fraud, if there is no actual danger of such fraud, and that is to discourage voting by persons likely to vote against the party responsible for imposing the burdens."

-"The authors' overall assessment is that 'voter ID laws don't disenfranchise minorities or reduce minority voting, and in many instances enhance it' [emphasis added]. In other words, the authors believe that the net effect of these laws is to increase minority voting. Yet if that is true, the opposition to these laws by liberal groups is senseless. If photo ID laws increase minority voting, liberals should rejoice in the laws and conservatives deplore them. Yet it is conservatives who support them and liberals who oppose them. Unless conservatives and liberals are masochists, promoting laws that hurt them, these laws must suppress minority voting and the question then becomes whether there are offsetting social benefits-the evidence is that there are not."

Posner's opinion is echoing across the country, the way that eloquent dissents often will. It has changed the national dialogue on this issue, perhaps for good and certainly for the better. Making it harder for some people to vote, the way that Brian Kemp is doing in Georgia and the way Kris Kobach has suggested for the entire country, is an offense against democracy that works far too well. And, national pundits? This often is how you get an "enthusiasm gap." Pass it on.